.Hugo Gernsback, the remarkable man with a phenomenal seeing-eye into the futureBy Clark Kinnaird ~ Pennsylvania Gettysburg Times
~ 1965.12.23

Perhaps the most unusual Christmas greeting mailed each season
comes from the office in New York of a man who is as fascinating as he
is widely unknown," said an editorial in a newspaper whose attention thousands
of internationally important persons seek, The Washington Post.

The reference was to Hugo Gernsback, who began in 1936 distributing
a Christmas greeting in the form of a miniature magazine. As the years
passed and the remarkable foresight of Mr. Gernsback was proven over and
over, the greetings were eagerly and respectfully awaited annually by an
elite list of great physicists, engineers, chemists, and other men of science
around the world. Consequently, so many request came in to be on the Christmas
list of the man the London press hailed as "the worlds greatest science
prophet" that he had to limit the quantity and refuse pleas for back numbers.

Gernsback was "widely unknown" only to non-readers during the last fifty
years of (his long list of magazine publications). He offered one of the
first radio receivers for sale to the public. He founded the first magazine
devoted to radio technology. He was the founder of the first Wireless Association
for experimenters and "hams." The trophy most prized by writers of "Science-fiction"
is called the "Hugo" in tribute to the acknowledged "Father of Science-fiction."
Gernsback was editor and publisher of the first magazines in the world
devoted to this 20th Century literary genre.

Gernsback, a native of Luxembourg, who was educated in Europe, moved
to New York to set up Electro Importing Co. while Marconi was still trying
to establish the first trans-atlantic wireless circuit.

No comprehensive history of radio or television, or of other aspects
of electronics could begin without use of Gernsback publications and and
notes of his personal experimentations as basic source materials. Typically,
as one researcher found, the first "standard broadcast station to transmit
a television image was Hugo Gernsback's station WRNY, in New Jersey, which
on Aug. 18, 1928, transmitted a square image of the face of Mrs. John Geleso,
which was viewed at New York University by 500 persons." Four years earlier,
Gernsback had described an eventual development , a "Radio-controlled Television
Airplane" equipped to provide its ground control with sight east, west,
north, sough, up and down, for directing and releasing of selected targets.

He predicted the use of TV in medical diagnosis, in industry and in
scores of other ways.

The revolutionary discovery that a person can be taught while asleep
was reported by the American Association for Advancement of Science in
1965. Fifty-four years earlier Gernsback was laying the foundation of an
international reputation as "the world's greatest scientific prophet" with
such graphic forecasts of the future as this electronic device of imparting
knowledge to individuals under induced hypnosis or sleep. The same year,
1911, he described and pictured a "Teleshot," or Picturephone that became
reality in 1954. Naturally, Gernsback fostered formation in 1930 of the
earliest interplanetary society (later the American Rocket Society), and
published the first journal devoted to space conquest (now entitles Jet
Propulsion). He conceived of orbiting man-carrying space stations in
1929.

And looking Ahead. . .You'll be seeing anybody by phone in color!

Beyond the Picturephone, which was introduced commercially in 1964, or
53 years after he designed a Telephone, Hugo Gernsback was to predict "Language
rectified telephony," with an electronic translator enabling persons to
speak in different languages to each other without difficulty.

A few other previews of what's ahead given by gernsback in his unique
Christmas greeting forecasts: Nation-wide pipeline networks distributing
water from desalinization plants situated along coasts. Satellites transmitting
solar energy to power-lines on earth, Computerized electronic diagnoses
that end all guesswork in medical practice. Electronic "hurricane killers,"
Automated fisheries, with intake pipes sunk at the continental shelf offshore
bringing fish and plankton to processing plants inland. There will be two-fold
solutions to urban traffic jams: Narrow, two-wheel, gyro-cars, and airfoil
or retractable-wing autos that can literally fly! It'd take a book to detail
all Gernsback's remarkable prophecies year after year. His soundest prophecy,
he indicated in a repeated admonition: "Never forget for an instant that
all man's greatest inventions are still to come."

Karel Capak is immortalized by the term "robot" which he coined in 1920
from the Slav term robato for work. Capek wrote a popular international
play R.U.R about artificial men put into mass production and sold as workers
and soldiers. But in 1913, Gernsback had "Automatic Soldiers' engaged in
future wars controlled by radio from military hq. In 1924, Gernsback had
similar "Radio Police Automatons" moving on tank-like feet and spraying
tear-gas to quell riots. But Gernsback has never suggested that machines
can replace men in all respects. "Computers cannot think like a living
brain.

"No computer could write like Shakespeare."

Glimpse of Life on
the Planet MarsBy Hal BoyleCouncil Bluffs, Iowa
Nonpareil 1949.12.22

New
York AP -- Want to know what life is like on the planet Mars? Well, it's
a place where:The women rule, but husbands
sometimes win their way by going on sex strikes. The inhabitants live 3,000
to 5,000 years, and one wife just got her 129th divorce. The population
is limited to two billion scientifically bred Martians, and the ladies
must await their turn to have children. A famous Martian actress recently
gave birth to her first child at the age of 2,500 years.

No Traffic JamsMartians live in a vast
underground city a mile below the cold surface of the planet. There are
no traffic jams. Travel is by transparent vehicles that neutralize gravitation.
There has been no crime for 950 million years. Water is the most precious
commodity, and the last criminal was a man who violated the planet rule
against taking more than one bath in a month. His punishment: He was disintegrated.

This picture of life on Mars
is given in a tabloid Christmas magazine issued every year -- all in fun
-- by Dr. Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Science Fiction. The 1949 edition,
called "Quip," chronicles the adventures of a mythical explorer named Grego
Banshuck, who landed on Mars last October in a space ship. You don't have
to believe in explorer Banshuck anymore than you believe in Santa Claus,
but it's some world he says he found on Mars.

People 10 Feet TallThe people are 10 feet tall.
Because of the low gravity and thin air of the red planet, they have big
flat webbed feet, thin and fragile arms and legs, a barrel chest and a
huge head with a brain 9 1/2 times that of a human being. They communicate
by thought instead of by voice. Because the air doesn't carry scent well
they have developed a long nose like the trunk of an elephant.

Their thoughts are exchanged
by long telepathic antennas, growing from their heads. A male has two,
a female four. "The double antennas allow her to double-talk better," a
Martian quipped to the explorer. "This confuses the male better too."

Sometimes the Martian male
rebels against being ladybossed. "The males go on strike en masse -- millions
of them refuse to make love to their wives," reported Banshuck. "The
last 'sex strike' 14 years ago, involving over 2,500,000 males, lasted
five-and-one-half years. The males won!"

But Mars is no place for
a bachelor. The girls do the courting there -- what's so different about
that? -- and the man of her choice can't refuse her unless he is
already married. The explorer said the inhabitants don't like or trust
the human race and regard them as culturally and intellectually retarded.

Rat's Instinct"The earthlings have the
rat's instincts," one Martian columnist remarked. It is doubtful whether
the average man of earth, however, would want to trade places. Martians
according to Banshuck, eat synthetic food, never sleep, and are put to
death -- all except the great leaders -- at the age of 3,000. Outstanding
Martians are allowed to live to 5,000.

One feature of Martian life,
on the other hand, might appeal to earthy bureaucrats. Banshuck discovered
the planet is ruled by a conclave of five women, each of whom is elected
at the age of 2,000 and remains in power until death. This gives her 1,000
years in public office!

Forecast -- For many years
(the author says "in spite of all," he has been doing it since 1908) this
column has received an annual Christmas card from Hugo Gernsback, New York
publisher. It's always in the form of a pocket sized booklet, usually contains
32 pages, and always is a forecast for the coming year.

This year, in his "Forecast
1954," Gernsback says the first atom-powered space ship will take off for
the moon in 1970. In Forecast 1954, Gernsback outlines in etail the first
flight to the moon in a television-guided spaceship which will be unmanned.

Completely outfitted with
a unique television transmitter, it will relay to earth all the sights,
sounds and experiences humans might undergo on that epic flight. This first
flight will be teh forerunner of manned ships of the future, he says.

New
York -(AP) - Year after year Hugo Gernsback probably puts out the most
unusual Christmas cards in America. Each year they contain predictions
by Gernsback, publisher of the magazine "Radio-Electronics," on how life
will be lived in the future.

Some years his forecasts
are pretty eerie. This year they are weirder than weird. If Gernsback is
even half-right, the average man will probably be glad he lives in the
present -- and that the next century will be up to posterity to endure.

Take the matter of transportation.
Glancing into his crystal ball, Gernsback sees the "air-mobile" as the
only final answer to today's traffic problem. Motorists will zoom
through the skies in small gravity-resistant cars propelled by compressed
air. "All-around radar will make collisions in the air almost an impossibility,"
he adds.

Are you worried about where
you will be buried? Gernsback is. He fears the earth soon will be too crowded
for cemeteries. But he has an answer --
space burials. Coffins containing the dead will be taken up into outer
space by flying funerary ships. At the proper altitude the ships will discharge
their cargo in a direction away from the sun. Frozen snug in your casket,
you will then soar out of the pattern of the solar system -- and sail on
forever in space. Gernsback sees this as the most practical way a man can
"go to heaven." Anybody want to be first?

But to the ordinary mortal
the most dismal innovation envisioned by Gernsback is a gadget he calls
"electronics-perceptor."Like most people he has
pondered the mystery of sex, and has decided, "sex is a complex electrical
phenomenon." Well, it certainly is complex, sometimes it does produce sparks
and there is no doubt it is quite a phenomenon. Gernsback feels that
as science learns more about sex it will produce the "electromicro-perceptor,"
or sex measurer. By undergoing tests with this machine couples will supposedly
be able to determine whether they will be compatible in marriage, at least
in terms of physical responses.

It may well be that Gernsback
is right about the bright future of the airmobile, space burials and the
electronized brain. But will any man in his right mind ever come home to
a wife who keeps an "electromicro-perceptor" in the house? I doubt it.

The Things To ComeOhio Zanesville Times
Recorder ~ 1959.12.18

Maybe you never heard of
Hugo Gernsback. We never did, until his unique Christmas greeting, called
Forecast 1960, reached us the other day.Gernsback, editor and publisher
of Radio-Electronics Magazine has quite a reputation, we understand, for
his predictions of things to come.

In his latest glimpse into
the crystal ball, Gernsback comes up with the forecast that the first manned
spaceship will not reach the moon and return intact to earth until 1980.
And he sees some lush accommodations at the moon's hotels with underground
gardens providing fresh vegetables for the guests.

He ventures a little far
afield in one of his predictions, development of what he terms Cephalotaph.
It is for those who prefer to have the remains of their loved ones fully
preserved. He foresees an electroplated head of the deceased which will
last more than 10,000 years.

Then there's the Odorchestra
for scented concerts. Varying odors would be loosed in the theater to complement
the music. This, he reasons, would call another sense into play with the
blending and changing of a color score shown on a big curved screen.

Finally, he predicts a purely
synthetic tobacco -- less solid cigarette without paper, tar or nicotine.
It will be cheaper than today's smokes.

Some of Gernsback's forecasts
leave us a little cold, but we do find solace in one respect. He made no
mention of new tools designed to destroy all of mankind.

Over
the years two small publications have brought joy to me during the holiday
season. They are "The Old Farmer's Almanac" and "Forecast" by Hugo Gernsback.

Gernsback is noted as the
"Father of Science Fiction" in which he has been a foremost practitioner
for more than 50 years. What particularly distinguishes Gernsback, however,
is that so many of the products of his imagination or crystal ball have
become fact in his lifetime. So his annual forecast is not lightly dismissed.
Indeed, during the present holiday season, his "Forecast 1961" hs been
better than tranquilizers. Until it arrived I had been sunk in melancholia
induced by too much indiscriminate reading.

Shortly before Christmas
I read in "The Insider's Newsletter," a portentous pamphlet for an insider's
insides, that the "Air Force has fought the next war on computers and concluded
that with our present city-destruction strategy, we can't win."

If that isn't sufficient
to take the curl out of your permanent, what is? But that was only the
beginning don't want to reduce others to my gelatinous state, so I shall
spare you the gloom-and-doom statistics that made me doubt Santa Claus.

However, I must offer one
more sentence in evidence, to wit: "AF pumped every conceivable combination
of weapons and situations into the computers and it always came out a U.S.
loss." (And a Happy New Year to you, too, "Insider's Newsletter"!)

Even after I wired my Congressman
to buy new computers for the Air Force, no amount of knitting could mend
the ravelled sleeve of care. Nor was this all. In another publication,
several scientists warned us earthlings that we must be prepared for the
discovery of other intelligent beings in space. In addition, they advised
if the intelligent beings out yonder are more civilized than we,
then we must reconcile ourselves to the collapse of our world. That's the
way the mop always flops, the scientists said, when superior and inferior
intelligences collide.

Is it any wonder that in
recent days I have kept looking over my shoulder to see which is gaining
on me fastest: computers or space commuters. Then, in the nick of time
to save my fingernails, the Gernsback forecast arrived and banished the
bogey men and machines. Far from annihilation in a decade or so, Gernsback
looks 100 years into the future and sees a world of peace and plenty, and
a hearty handshake all around the universe.

Air Force computers or no,
Martians, Orson Welles or not, Gernsback forecasts a world relieved of
the threat of nuclear destruction. In 2061 the only wars will be technical-economic
ones, under the benign guidance of a United World Government.

English will be the universal
legal language, which means we have headed off the Russians in at least
that direction. The world's population will be stabilized, by simple scientific
means, at six billion persons. The moon will be made livable by 1990.

A hundred years from now,
man's unwanted hereditary diseases and defects will be banished by simple
injections into the blood stream. Night will be no more, having been banished
by artificial hydrogen-reaction sun-clusters stationed 22,000 miles above
the equator. Even they will b e turned off every night for three hours
to oblige astronomers (and, presumably, sundodgers, smochers, and muggers).
Crops will be tripled; hurricanes and tornadoes banished.